S. Awan is a failed journalist, a student of history, a lover of music, film, culture, and an enthusiast of the the controversial and the weird.
Also a musician, and part-time freelance, involuntary human being. Also occasionally lives on the moon. Also is a ghost. And a cigarette butt that hasn't been put out properly; so, you know, there's still, like, smoke coming out of it and stuff...

In June 2014, a group of armed militants and extremists made their dramatic journey across the Syrian border into Iraq, quickly capturing Mosul and Baiji and almost reaching the capital Baghdad.

The group possessed convoys of identical Toyota trucks and the kind of arsenal some countries in the region would be envious of. The media was flooded with footage of drive-by shootings, large-scale death marches, mass executions and mass graves. Any Iraqi soldier captured was executed.

That incursion of the Islamic State (IS) brigades into Iraq was part of a planned military-intelligence operation supported covertly by various states.

The jihadists at some point appropriated entire truckloads of American humvees; they acquired helicopters, tanks, and artillery. They photographed and filmed themselves, openly broadcasting what they were doing all over social media. In spite of this, no attempt was made by the US or anyone else to stop them – not until after the group had already taken over entire cities or towns and begun its bloody crusade. (more…)

The war in Yemen – and it’s accompanying humanitarian catastrophe – has been going on a very long time now; and it shows no signs of abating any time soon.

And about the seeming apathy of Western media and politicians and the hypocrisy in terms of how the Biblical-scaled suffering in Yemen is broadly ignored while geo-politically-motivated coverage of other crises elsewhere are amplified. They really don’t like us talking about Yemen – they would prefer we talked about Venezuela or Syria.

On the actual war side of it, which has often been nebulous and murky, it has become evident that – in addition to US and UK logistical support for Saudi Arabia’s campaign – Israel is also more involved in the Yemen situation than most people realise. (more…)

So it looks like US military intervention in Venezuela might be on the cards.

Certainly, with Washington and other Western governments now officially recognising someone other than the sitting president as the legitimate leader, it’s hard to see how there won’t have to be some kind of forced conflict to finalise that arrangement: if it isn’t US military intervention, it would have to be some kind of military coup within Venezuela.

Either way, it’s been telegraphed way in advance. President Trump said a year and a half ago. “We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary,” Trump told reporters at his New Jersey golf club.

He went on to say, “We have many options for Venezuela and by the way, we’re all over the world and we have troops all over the world in places that are very, very far away. Venezuela is not very far away and the people are suffering and dying. We have many options for Venezuela including a possible military option if necessary.”

It looks like they’re now moving towards probably putting that into action. (more…)

You know, sometimes you start out with a simple question.

And you start exploring for possible answers to that question; only to end up falling down a deeper rabbit-hole than you had expected. Then you just end up with more questions.

A lot of coverage was given to Donald Trump’s decision apparently to announce withdrawal of US troops from Syria. My initial question was simply why the US President had suddenly announced this: and why the Defense Secretary James Mattis had resigned in response.

But instead this has become a much longer article, linking up everything from Syria, Libya and Africa to China, the possible nature of the ‘Trump vs China’ pantomime, possible groundwork for a future ‘New World Order’ control model and the ‘armies’ of the future, and even Cambridge Analytica.

As it happens, the reason is because one man – one machiavellian, enigmatic figure – appears to be a nexus connecting all of these seemingly disparate things. (more…)

The Lockerbie bombing in 1988 was perhaps the 9/11 of its time: and today marks 30 years since it happened.

While it didn’t result in the kind of phony Global ‘War on Terror’ that was conducted after 9/11, it did give the US and Britain the platform for beginning a targeted downfall of a particular nation and society, this being Libya.

This was accomplished the same way in Libya as it was accomplished in Iraq: first by years and years of crippling sanctions and forced hardship (via the UN),then by all-out destruction against a nation that is no longer able to defend itself (Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011).

There are essentially two ways to look at Lockerbie.

One, the most important, is as a criminal investigation of an act of mass murder.The other is as a prolonged political or geo-political tool serving multiple purposes. Both are worth revisiting; particularly as the ghost of Lockerbie (and all of its victims) has reappeared in news media in the last few weeks.

Revisiting the subject of Lockerbie is important both as a study of geo-politics and the place of political terrorism within that arena and as a study in history and how it relates to contemporary events.

I want to take a broad overview of the Lockerbie subject here, touching on all of those areas: this article will cover (1) the reasons why the ‘official’ story of Lockerbie is so problematic and disputed, (2) the release of the ‘Lockerbie Bomber’ from prison in Scotland and why it happened, (3) the political and geopolitical motives and consequences of the Lockerbie trial and verdict, and finally (4) the many different theories as to who really did carry out the Lockerbie bombing and why. (more…)

Amid all the recent provocation and manuevering concerning Russia, Ukraine and the Azov Sea (see here and here), another story may have passed under a lot of peoples’ radars: concerning not the Azov Sea, but Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi ‘Azov Batallion’.

It’s arguably not a huge story in itself: and I’ll get to it in a moment.

But I want to explore how I think this story relates to so much else of what I’ve been talking about here for a few years now: including the war on Russia, the Islamists and the destablisation of the Middle East, the projected ‘race wars’ or societal breakdown, the rise of the Far-Right and white supremacists, and the possible or probable fascist conspiracy manuevering behind all of this.

You often find, when you’ve been keeping tabs on various different situations or themes for a few years, that they tend to come together and inter-relate more often than you’d think – indicating that even things that appear to be unconnected on the surface actually weave together as part of a dangerous web.

This would be either by deliberate design or by unforeseen consequences and the dominoe effect. (more…)

It can be dangerous to be an activist for the environment or even for human rights: particularly in a country where foreign-trained Death Squads are working directly for the corporations whose interests you’re interfering with.

I covered the Honduras coup in that article too: and revisited it recently again here in relation to the current Migrant Caravan from Honduras to the US/Mexico border.

The short recap is that the US State Department in 2009 provided cover for a right-wing military coup in Honduras that overthrew the elected government and has been in power ever since: engaging in mass suppression, state violence and general dictatorship. (more…)

The highly divisive drama in the US, concerning the ‘Migrant Caravan’ from Central America, is clearly being manipulated and stage-managed by the media and by rival propaganda campaigns that are using vulnerable human beings as tools for mass manipulation and division.

In fact, this isn’t new: this seems to be a re-run of the 2015-onwards Migrant Crisis that destabilised Europe, albeit the American version.

The weaponisation – on both sides of the ‘argument’ – of the migrants and their situation is a contrived, scripted affair, mostly divorced from the reality of the problem and the key points in recent history that are relevant here (namely, what happened in Honduras several years ago – which NO ONE on either side of the idealogical divide seems to be talking about).

I’ll offer a recap on the Honduras situation in a moment – because it’s the elephant in the room that seems to be being glossed over.

But there’s a couple of things to bear in mind.

First, the whole way this is being made to appear and to unfold seems designed for maximum dramatic imagery and to provoke maximum xenophobia. It’s one thing for the rabid ‘Build the Wall’ crowd to see news items about scattered incidents of individual illegal migrants or small groups of asylum seekers – but when the situation is presented as an organised mass of people on their way to the border, it is clearly primed to provoke maximum paranoia and resistance. (more…)

The latest episode of the Reality TV show that is presently the United States of America appeared to make very little sense: though it was a high-quality drama that helped fill media space for a few days and keep everyone occupied.

In fact, the whole thing did come across like an entirely stage-managed media production or event: complete with dramatic scenes of CNN presenters having to broadcast from the street, as their studios were apparently in lockdown from the bomb threat.

The villain of the piece – Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr (although the real villain of the story was meant to be Trump himself) – even came complete with his own media super-villain name, the ‘MAGA Bomber’. That hashtag got trending pretty quickly.

The alleged perpetrator was apparently a big-time Trump supporter, who had previously been filmed at Trump rallies wearing the dumb MAGA cap. The crude ‘pipe bombs’ were mailed to various targets, including former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State and Sith Lord Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Joe Biden, billionaire George Soros, actor Robert De Niro, and several others, including the CNN studio itself. (more…)

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